Shea Moisture Commercial – Normal Hair Controversy

If you all haven’t heard, Shea Moisture released a new campaign video that came off as a little disrespectful to its buyers.

The company has been recently releasing many campaigns and doing fundraisers to help promote loving your hair. The idea is that everyone should love their hair no matter the texture, the color, the length, etc.

This is an awesome idea! I commend Shea Moisture for being bold and taking a stand against a very real problem throughout the world, but this most recent Shea Moisture commercial video is a jaw dropper.

In case you didn’t know, blacks make up a huge percentage of Shea Moisture’s buyers. Once upon a time the product was promoted heavily to black women, and it could only be found in the ethnic section of stores. So, for this reason, this video saddens me.

While I respect Shea Moisture for taking a leap and adding white women to their campaign; I think this video was very poorly executed.

As you can see, the video has only one black woman in it, and she’s mixed. The rest are white women. This isn’t OK. It’s not OK to create a new campaign and completely ignore the buyers who’ve been purchasing this product since before Shea Moisture even became popular. It’s disrespectful, and it shows lack of appreciation for your supporters.

There are many beautiful black woman with long voluptuous hair that could have flourished in this campaign. Now, I’m not saying make a video with all black woman because Shea Moisture is wanting to open their product to all races and ethnicities. What I’m saying is, there is a way to expand your product without forgetting about the people who helped you become popular to begin with.

This Shea Moisture commercial video caused a lot of controversy. Shea Moisture responded almost immediately on Facebook with an apology to its viewers.

“Wow, okay – so guys, listen, we really f-ed this one up. Please know that our intention was not – and would never be – to disrespect our community, and as such, we are pulling this piece immediately because it does not represent what we intended to communicate.

You guys know that we have always stood for inclusion in beauty and have always fought for our community and given them credit for not just building our business but for shifting the beauty landscape. So, the feedback we are seeing here brings to light a very important point.

While this campaign included several different videos showing different ethnicities and hair types to demonstrate the breadth and depth of each individual’s hair journey, we must absolutely ensure moving forward that our community is well-represented in each one so that the women who have led this movement never feel that their hair journey is minimized in any way.

We are keenly aware of the journey that WOC face – and our work will continue to serve as the inspiration for work like the Perception Institute’s Good Hair Study/Implicit Association Test that suggests that a majority of people, regardless of race and gender, hold some bias towards women of color based on their textured or natural hair.

So, you’re right. We are different – and we should know better.

Thank you all, as always, for the honest and candid feedback. We hear you. We’re listening. We appreciate you. We count on you. And we’re always here for you. Thank you, #SheaFam, for being there for us, even when we make mistakes. Here’s to growing and building together…”

So what do you think? Do you accept Shea Moisture’s apology? Or do you feel like it should have never happened to begin with? Let me know in the comment section below what you think about this situation.